by Zack Beauchamp
Dan Drezner worries the Administration is taking Fareed Zakaria's ideas too close to heart:
Ceteris paribus, burden-sharing and local support are obviously nifty things to have. I guarantee you, however, that the time will come when an urgent foreign-policy priority will require some kind of military statecraft, and these criteria will not be met. The Obama administration should know this, since its greatest success in military statecraft to date did not satisfy either of these criteria. There is always a danger, after a perceived policy success, to declare it as a template for all future policies in that arena. Pundits make this mistake all the time. Policymakers should know better.
Drezner's argument is based on this Josh Rogin interview with Ben Rhodes, where Rhodes suggests that "Obama's strategy for the military intervention in Libya will not only result in a better outcome in Libya but also will form the basis of Obama's preferred model for any future military interventions." One shouldn't overstate the point – learning from historical experience is obviously integral to good policymaking – but Drezner's right to worry about trying to graft every aspect of the Libya strategy onto different issues. Policymakers have something of a fraught history when it comes to the overuse of historical analogies.
The Dish 